Walking the Talk: Great Expectations - The Brothers Einstein - MediaBizBlogger

I remember driving some years ago along the Olympic Peninsula south of Seattle in the Pacific Northwest on a cold and rainy winter day. I had expected to find solace in miles and miles of verdant old growth rain forest, but instead encountered acre after acre of clear-cut desolation, replete with Orwellian signage that euphemized the devastation as managed forests.

Fade out, fade in: Nowadays when I hear agencies talk about managed expectations, I can't help but think of the media landscape as a gigantic managed forest, clear-cut and desolate. Nowadays it seems that the phrase managed expectations is little more than a euphemism for lowered expectations.

In fact, I'm beginning to suspect that we don't truly manage our expectations as much as they manage us.In the Brothers Einstein, my little boutique agency, my brother Mike and I predicate our work and relationships partly on what we call the Albert Keeler Principle, an amalgam borrowed from the sage counsel of two 20th-century American giants, Albert Einstein, and Hall of Fame baseball great, Wee Willie Keeler.

According to Albert Einstein…
No problem can be solved from the same level of consciousness that created it.

And according to Mr. Keeler, we should…
Hit 'em where they ain't.

Notably, Messrs. Einstein and Keeler made it a point to approach their respective disciplines as perpetual outsiders. They eschewed convention and looked for the anomalies, for the exceptions, not the rules. They looked for the mistakes of others, pounced on them and in between them, and ascended to greatness. Indeed, they ascended to greatness in no small measure because they expected greatness, from themselves not least.

In his wonderful essay, Self-Reliance,Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote that "…a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds." But a foolish consistency breeds more than little minds. Fealty to convention and consistency promotes scale and quantity at the expense of intimacy and quality, converts relationships into commodities, and breeds lower expectations. And nothing breeds little minds like lowered expectations.

If we want less we need only expect less. Case in point: George W. Bush. No one expected greatness from him, and look what happened. Likewise, no one expects anyone in Congress to do anything except pander and raise money for re-election, so that's pretty much all they do. Performance, it seems, rises and falls with our expectations. If we want more, we need to raise our expectations. If we want more from the Obama administration, we need to raise our expectations accordingly. Cultural greatness emerges only from cultures of great expectations.

The same expectation-to-performance ratio exists across the board in all of our relationships. The more we expect of ourselves, the more we can expect from others in return. My brother Mike and I learned some years ago not to manage to our bottom line. We learned instead to manage to our expectations, which -- like our fees -- only go up as a result. Conversely, managing to the bottom line will almost always reduce performance and breed little minds. Managing to the bottom line will almost always lower our expectations.

We have become so inured to failure as a consequence and companion of digital scale that we have all but stopped asking for more. Yet A Course in Miracles suggests that the problem is not that we ask for too much, rather that we don't ask for nearly enough. The same is true of our expectations. We fear raising them because we fear the ensuing disappointment. But we demonstrate a natural tendency to become our attention over time, and the more we focus on diminished expectations because we fear failure, the more failure we guarantee. In the end, our expectations -- like our fears -- manage us.

We cannot continue to expect our digital communications technologies to compensate for relationships that simply don't exist, because business describes much more than commerce. Business describes relationships,and the relationships in our lives describe how and where and with whom we spend our time. Our relationships shape our expectations, which then return to shape our relationships. In recent years, however, our relationships with others have been truncated by the sheer time and resources we devote to our relationships with digital media technologies. The quality of our relationships and the level of our expectations suffer commensurately. It's time for agencies and advertisers to get real with themselves and walk their respective relationship talk.

The only real antidote to diminished expectations in the digital age is to exchange the emotional desolation of scale for the intimacy of human contact, one voice or one face at a time. Don't look for quick and easy ways to expand your contact database; search instead for ways to eliminate shallow, technology-driven relationships and the massive overhead they incur. Accordingly, don't manage your relationships by email. Don't manage them by text message or tweet. Schedule some time to break bread with your clients (or agency). Pick up the fucking phone before you forget how to use it, before you forget the power of your own voice, and before there is nothing left to manage but managed forests.

About Jeff Einstein and the Brothers Einstein

Jeff Einstein is one-half of the Brothers Einstein, a creative strategy and branding boutique. The Brothers Einstein work with select rapid-growth clients to help define and execute healthy brand strategies in a toxic media environment.